School system administrators, principals, counselors, faculty members and support staff make decisions that influence the learning environment either at a system-wide, local school, or at an individual student level. In making such decisions, administrators, faculty and staff must often overcome obstacles related to either a lack of sufficient data or, conversely, the need to organize an overwhelming quantity of data. The inability to access the right data at the right time or to acquire reliable, consistent and accurate data also thwarts the efforts of faculty and staff to apply data in the decision making process. For example, a school administrator with a large and diverse student population may have difficulty in determining the correlation between a number of factors, such as academic preparedness, student mobility, course enrollment, and student test scores on standardized tests. An understanding of the relationships between these factors may influence staffing decisions, funding for a local school program, and/or result in changes to a student's academic plans.
In addition to the data issues described, faculty and staff must also contend with the lack of adequate user-friendly tools to access, organize, and analyze data. Educational institutions collect vast quantities of student demographic and performance data. However, the format of this data is often ill suited for the average administrator, faculty or staff member who lacks the sophisticated technical skills and/or time to gather and prepare the data for analysis. Thus, administrators, faculty and staff must either make decisions with insufficient or incomplete data or must delay decision making while computer specialists, statisticians, or other staff members compile the required data.
The current decision support methods for education is a labor-intensive effort with respect to data gathering and preparation. As a result, existing processes can not respond rapidly in today's dynamic environment characterized by growth in student diversity; increased student mobility; higher expectations from families, politicians, and industry; competition from alternative educational providers; shortened life-cycle for instructional technology; new research in learning methods; limited funding resources; impact of social issues such as violence and substance abuse; and accelerated expansion of humanity's knowledge in all fields of study. In such an environment, the decision support methods of yesteryear are obsolete for today's educators.
A majority of current student information systems address only operational needs, such as processing transactions related to the activities that occur during the school day or satisfying static record keeping mandates. These systems provide insufficient methods to support data analysis for educational decision-making. The invention resolves this deficiency.